The Sicilian (1984)¶

At a glance¶

Author: Mario Puzo
Published: November 1984
Publisher: Random House
Story years: 1943–1950
Setting: Sicily
Series position: Second in the Godfather novel sequence
Adapted as: The Sicilian (1987), dir. Michael Cimino

Puzo's own sequel, published fifteen years after The Godfather, and the most peculiar book in the sequence: a real historical novel about the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, with Michael Corleone attached to it as a frame.

The premise¶

It is 1950, and Michael Corleone is at the end of his two-year exile — the period the 1972 film elides in a montage. Before he can go home, Don Tommasino gives him a last job on his father's instruction: bring Salvatore Giuliano to America.

Giuliano is the most wanted man in Italy and the most loved man in Sicily — a bandit who has been redistributing seized grain and land to the peasantry, who commands genuine popular devotion, and who has become useful to, and then dangerous to, everyone: the Mafia boss Don Croce Malo, the Sicilian separatist movement, the landowners, and the Christian Democrats in Rome.

Michael waits. The novel goes back and tells Giuliano's story. It ends the way it historically ended: with Giuliano dead, betrayed by his cousin and lieutenant Aspanu Pisciotta, and an official account of his death that nobody believes.

Michael's presence is genuinely marginal. He observes, he waits, and he goes home. The book is not about him.

The real Giuliano¶

Salvatore Giuliano (1922–1950) was an actual person and remains one of the great unresolved cases in modern Italian history. He killed a carabiniere at twenty while smuggling grain, took to the mountains of Montelepre, and built a band that at its height was effectively a parallel authority in western Sicily.

He was used by the separatist EVIS movement, courted by the Mafia, and implicated in the Portella della Ginestra massacre of May 1, 1947, in which eleven May Day celebrants were shot dead — an atrocity whose authorship has never been settled and which is central to every account of him. He was found dead in a courtyard in Castelvetrano in July 1950; the official version, that he was killed in a shootout with police, was disbelieved almost immediately. Pisciotta, who had confessed to the killing, was himself poisoned in prison.

Puzo alters the spelling of the surname and a great deal else. See Real-World Mafia.

Is it any good?¶

Better than its reputation and worse than it should be.

The Giuliano material is the strongest sustained writing Puzo did after The Godfather — a genuine political novel about how a popular movement gets consumed by the powers it thinks it is using. The Sicilian landscape and the fatalism of the peasantry are handled with real authority; this is the material Puzo actually knew.

The problem is the frame. Michael Corleone is bolted on for commercial reasons, contributes nothing, and drags a reader's expectations toward a book this isn't. Every review in 1984 made roughly the same observation, and it remains the right one.

Continuity problems¶

The Sicilian claims a slot inside the 1972 film — the two years between Apollonia's death and Michael's return. The film gives no hint that Michael spent those years entangled in the most notorious political affair in postwar Sicily.

It is best read as a novel that borrows Michael rather than as a missing chapter. See Continuity.

The film adaptation solved the problem by amputation: Michael Cimino's 1987 film removed Michael Corleone and every other Godfather element entirely, because the film rights to those characters belonged to Paramount and this production didn't have them.